Guns, Germs, And Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond(W.W. Norton & Company, New York and London: 1997). Diamond's book is an effort to answer his New Guinean friend's simple question, "How come you whites ended up
with all the cargo?" By "cargo" he meant the technology of the developed world. On further examination, the question expands to, "why did the developed world,
particularly Eurasia, end up with all the steel, guns, food crops, domesticated animals, and infectious diseases?" A born naturalist who took up bird-watching at
an early age, a world traveller, and a talented linguist with a PhD in molecular physiology, Jared Diamond is uniquely qualified to synthesize disparate
information from fields such as archaeology, cultural anthropology, evolutionary biology, epidemiology, linguistics, physiology, and history to help us view the
evolution of human societies in a different perspective.

Historians so rarely take into account the biological constraints on civilizations that they often
misconstrue the real reasons for their rise and fall. In summing up why Africa did not develop at the
same pace as Europe, Diamond states: "In short, Europe's colonization of Africa had nothing to do with
differences between European and African peoples themselves, as white racists assume. Rather, it was due to accidents of geography and biogeography--in particular, to the continents' different areas, axes,
and suites of wild plant and animal species. That is, the different historical trajectories of Africa and Europe stem ultimately from differences in real estate."

Darwin Among the Machines, The Evolution of Global Intelligence, by George B. Dyson(Perseus Books, Reading, Massachusetts: 1997), is a remarkable intellectual
tour from Hobbes' Leviathan to the Internet, touching on the history of ideas, telegraphy, cryptography, cybernetics, economics, biology, and the origin of music and language. The best way to get the feel for this book is to read some excerpts:"The step-by-step expression of evolutionary intelligence, compared to the human
attention span, is immeasurably slow. The evidence may become inescapable when speeded up. The invisible web of connections that bind an ecology--biological,
computational, or both--into a living whole begins to move at a visible pace when the machines evolve from year to year, new generations of software are exchanged
in minutes, and control is exercised from one microsecond to the next. [...] ...our definition of intelligence is so anthropocentric as to be next to useless for anything
else." (pp. 187-188)

"Individual cells are persistent patterns composed of molecules that come and go; organisms are
persistent patterns composed of individual cells that come and go; species are persistent patterns composed of individuals that come and go. Machines...are enduring patterns composed of parts that are
replaced from time to time and reproduced from one generation to the next. A global organism--and a global intelligence--is the next logical step..." (p. 191)

AION, Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, by Carl Gustav Jung(Bollingen Series XX, Vol. 9, II, Princeton, 1959). No list of
books about consciousness and the self would be complete without a mention of C.G. Jung. I have chosen this volume because it is most pertinent, but all of Jung’s
works are worth reading and re-reading. Jung’s concept of the self as the archetype of wholeness and integration, and his writings on the “process of
individuation” are crucial to understanding the psychology of modern men and women. I was unable to find this volume listed on Amazon.com, so I presume it is
out of print. Have a book search service find it for you, or check with your local used book store.

A History of the Mind, by Nicholas Humphrey(Harper, 1992).
Subtitled “Evolution and the Birth of Consciousness,” the book is a serious attempt to create a theory of consciousness that fits all the known data and isn’t rooted in
metaphysics. Humphrey concludes that consciousness is the result of neural feedback loops in entities that are capable of sensory perception. His chapter on the phonomenon of blindsight is fascinating.

The Prehistory of the Mind, by Steven Mithen(Thames and
Hudson, 1996). Subtitled “The Cognitive Origins of Art and Science.” This is an excellent book on the development of mind by an archaeologist. He provides an
excellent summary of various “modular” theories of mind which posit multiple intelligences that may be autonomous or interdependent, depending on the
evolutionary branch of the entity involved. When these various intelligences or modules function together, interdependently, we have a modern, conscious homo sapiens sapiens. This is a highly speculative work, in that it tries to link the
evolution of these mental modules to the evolution of the primate group that leads to modern man through a careful review of relevant information gleaned from archaeology and
paleontology. I don’t always think his analogies appropriate, but I find them helpful nonetheless. I feel
obliged to throw in a ritual gripe about modern authors’ inability to use the subjunctive tense in English, but it’s a very interesting book nonetheless.

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, by Julian Jaynes(Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston: 1976). This book has been a major influence
on my thinking for more than a decade. Jaynes' thesis is that consciousness is a relatively recent phenomenon, little more than three millennia old. Consciousness can be correlated
with the development of connections between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, which in turn can be correlated with the evolution of language and the
emergence of writing. This connection of the brain's hemispheres was more tenuous in early women and men, who were not conscious in the modern sense.
Jaynes refers to them as bicameral people--people with divided minds. Jaynes theorizes that right brain communicated with left brain via the anterior commissure
utilizing the mechanism of speech; that bicameral people (more or less) heard a voice in their heads that told them what to do in every situation. This is the origin of god
(s). The voice of God told bicameral people what to do. Jaynes' first illustration is from the Illiad of Homer: every time there is a crisis among the Hellenes, a god appears and tells the hero
what course of action he should take. Jaynes interprets schizophrenia as a reversion to bicameral functioning--it is invariably accompanied by voices in the head which compel the victim to do things.

I read this book with great skepticism, but the further I read the more I thought Jaynes must be on to something. He is not right in every particular and some of his terminology is awkward, but I believe he
has uncovered a useful paradigm for the evolution of consciousness. Jaynes was professor of psychology at Princeton University. He died in 1997 at the age of 77.